H.264 came out in 2003. Shouldn’t the patents associated with it have expired by now? 23 years is more than 20 years from the filing date or else the codec’s release itself is prior art. The 17 years from issuance rule ended in 1995. I don’t think they can have any Lemelson style submarine patents that are still valid.
The entire notion of ‘Intellectual Property’ is a cancer on society.
Information and ideas intrinsically accrue value the more they’re known and used, and the incentives provided around their collation and attribution should embody that, not punish them with imaginary locks that provide ownership.
I can see the purpose when done correctly but that would mean maybe a 3-5 year protection to give you a headstart on the competition not 20+ years of monopoly and stagnation.
The notion that ideas need protection from competition is foundationally caustic. The current regime incentivises locking them behind exclusionary and extractive mechanics as if they’re finite, when they’re intrinsically the opposite.
I can see how ‘IP’ can appear appealing, if not justifiable, but I’d argue this is only because alternatives have been too effectively suppressed by the sociopaths benefiting from the status quo.
So am I not affected if I don’t stream anything? What about SmartTubeNext will Google just make the streaming even worse for me?
Long Live WebM I guess.
webm can contain VP8, VP9 or AV1 video streams. I guess if you mean webm with VP9 inside it could be one solution, though less efficient. Also Google donated VP9 and what they had for VP10 to the development efforts of of AV1, so if AV1 is found to be infringing it’s a negative signal for VP9 too…
Edit: Sorry I was a bit off-topic. I was thinking of the action that Dolby is currently taking against Snapchat for their AV1 use.
We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.
is this why youtube is lagging and buffering?
That’s probably because Google are deliberately nerfing your viewing because you are using an ad blocker.
They tell you as much in the little pop up.
Legally VP8 is beginning to look like the go-to format for video…
_ /\ _
Does this have any impact towards the consumer?
Disconnect your TV from the internet and don’t let it update (downgrade) your software.
Thanks, but I don’t own a smart TV - hopefully dumb TVs are still gonna be around when it’s time to upgrade
They will probably make it more expensive to legally acquire content that is playable on a dumb TV than to get the same content for smart TVs. You’re paying extra for having indefinite access to the content rather than revokable subscription-based access.
Of course, as a consumer, you can become a criminal, with all the associated increasingly harsh consequences.
Probably price increases to offset corporate losses.
Price increases on streaming services you mean?
If so, a magical alternative exists on the high seas, or so I’ve heard
Man I can’t wait to upgrade my device/GPU with AV1 hardware support
AI slop bubble fart reverb sfx
For a while there Turbodong 2000 was my hope of what AI would be used for.
If you’re not in tears, we can’t be friends
I always wanted it to be CELERY MAN, personally.
Your first link is clearly an artist with a WEEKND anal sphincter.
AMD’s XT 7000 series is available for cheap as already a few gens old, or Intel ARC
Wait, is Stallman right again?
AGAIN?
I have met Stallman, I don’t like Stallman, Stallman is right about most thing related software licensing.
🪴
Stallman only eats open sores.
If I come up with a concept in philosophy can I patent it and charge money when people use it in their philosophy? Fees for codecs operate on this plane of backwardness. Patents in and of themselves are stupid enough, but the capacity for stupidity within patenting knows no bounds apparently.
I’m gonna go patent Marxism lol. Maybe I’ll patent irony at the same time.
Something like that very vaguely happened.
Ridiculous that the works of Marx, who’s been dead for like 150 years are still copyrighted by someone. But I think that patents are even more absurd than copyright.
Technically it’s just that particular English translation that’s copyrighted. The original text is public domain.
The patents have expired everywhere except USA, Brazil and Malaysia.
This is a blatant money grab before they expire everywhere.

But you then are forced to move to the US
open formats is the way to go. Patents seems more and more like a scam
Figures. Patents are the backbone of capitalism. Some say it invented capitalism as we know it.
I mean, I get the idea of patents. If there were no protection of “ideas”, some random person could have one, try to bring it to market but could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production. They have more resources and money, but might not have had that idea. There should be some protection. Problem is, that these are also abused by the big corporations, so… Maybe we need to fix this somehow.
ut could just be outplayed by a big corporation with enough money to copy this idea and sell it everywhere before he can even start production.
Which is also why Anti-Trust laws exist in pretty much every country and, when enforced, actually stop companies from becoming gargantuan Hydras.
In the US they haven’t been implemented for too long, of course.
Greed should be banned, not the patents. I feel like if wealth taxes were 50%+, people wouldn’t be incentived to jack up prices like this.
Software algorithms should not be patentable.
This is how it was before patent law. The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws. It is about creating artificial scarcity, which is an incredibly dumb concept in our modern world.
You need to eliminate the thought of the big guy stealing ideas from the little guy. This is propaganda used to play on our emotions. Intelectual Property benefits an extreme minority at the cost of billions of lives.
The sciences, arts, and commerce existed for thousands of years without these corporate laws.
lol they also existed with hidden and encrypted ideas to, you know, protect intellectual property…
“This is propaganda used to play on our emotions”
Oh do tell
" at the cost of billions of lives"
😂
That literally has nothing to do with patents nowadays. No one is hiding anything anymore, it is about artificial scarcity to collect monopoly rents.
The fact that you deny that we have already lost billions of lives because of corporations trying to extract monopoly rents is your perogative. It is stupid and ignorant, but your choice.
The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.
It’s usually fixed with a good competition. No one corporate can abuse the system if viable competitions exists.
But if I had to give some critique, then the duration for USA patent system is one that can create a money grab system by creating a costly dependency to a legacy system that has grown so long it is hard to replace.
Competition only works when the stuff you’re protecting can have competition. If it’s an algorithm that’s objectively better with no alternative, it doesn’t really work.
That’s not entirely fair to claim as so. There is competition like AV1, but it is lacking in marketing and brutality. Can’t really compete against big corporate if the goal is not to eat business profits from others like it is a vendetta.
Market liberalism is not the answer. It’s what we have today. It ends up with the giants eating the competition and using any advantage they have got. Only active legislation works against legal abuse against those that see it as sport.
Legislation would help, but so would a vendetta against a big corporation. Can’t really compete if your corporate is assimilated or not planning to eat away the profits from competition. :D
Not claiming that is all it would take
You should be able to own the right to bring a novel idea into production, after it’s generally available then it should have no protection.
Basically if you come up with an idea, you get to get the first initial rounds of profits to make it worth your while, that’s it.
thats a patent
Sure for physical things that need prototypes and materials. That is not a thing with software.
Development cost is still a thing with software.
Not really.
I mean it is technically, but software companies have the largest profit margin of any other company in history, that is the extra they make after paying all the bills including developers.
the only thing that even comes close is finance, and it is still off by orders of magnitude.
It is so skewed that it is literally breaking the entire economic model.
Ideas are cheap, and can spread instantly without costing extra.
The indie developer a person that doesn’t need a company wasn’t a thing after the industrial revolution anyone who could compete was a novelty but now you can spin up a factory that serves everyone in the world with a day’s work. people wouldn’t accept it but that’s just because competition is so strong that people are picky.
Software is a completely different thing than physical goods and it needs to be regulated as such unless you want the economy to break.
You sign NDAs with your testers and prototypers for that.
Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.
The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.
Patents are a way to spread knowledge, whole still offering some [time limited] protections. Before them, trade secrets were the norm, and way too much knowledge was lost with it’s creators.
It’s an outdated legalism. 250 years ago, the patent office operated as an incentive to record and register ideas to the public in exchange for exclusive commercial license.
Now that simply isn’t an issue
Software and business method patents have always been bullshit.
Patent the machine, not how you use it. Software is just instructions to a machine.
Perhaps patients have their place but software patients make no sense. One big issue is that it is not practical to avoid writing a system that already exists because there are many, many ways to describe the same software system. It’s so difficukt to search that multiple people could have already patiented the same thing and be unaware the other exists.
quietly
Stop putting “quietly” in your fucking headlines, you hacks. This wasn’t “quiet”, it was very publicly announced.
Slammed
slammed
Stop putting “slammed” in your fucking comments, you hacks. This wasn’t “the WWE”, it was very obviously Lemmy.
Blast
Blast
Stop putting “blast” in your fucking comments, you hacks. This wasn’t “NASA”, it was very obviously a user.
Shocked.
Shocked
Stop putting “shocked” in your fucking comments, you hacks. This wasn’t “the monkey”, it was very obviously a human.
On the internet nobody knows you’re
a catthe monkey
😡
Via LA told Streaming Media that it contacted unlicensed media companies during 2025 to give them “a window to secure a license” under the previous terms, but the company didn’t go to the trouble of issuing a press release or public announcement, opting instead for direct outreach. Any company that didn’t respond or wasn’t contacted now faces the new rate structure as its starting point for negotiations.
tiny bit clickbait, small companies are still at $100,000 unchanged

not that that should exist, either
Totally off topic, but man that is one terrible table design. 😆
What could possibly be worth my predicted lifetime worth of earnings?!?

























